So I have the usual issue with my Blender character rig having a scale issue when imported into Unreal. So far I’ve been closely following the following video to resolve the issue but with a strange issue:
My issue is when I try to apply the scaled root bone as the new rest pose, the bones scale down back to very small as if they were never scaled in the first place. In the example video, the scaled root bone keeps the larger scale when applying but mine seems to completely disregard it. Below is a gif of the “apply pose” shrinking as well as the associated blend file.
Not sure what you have going on there, or what you did to the file. But I think you are doing it wrong.
I haven’t watched the video, but I think you are going about scaling your character in the wrong way. You should be scaling the armature in object mode, and maybe the mesh too. I tried scaling a character I have by scaling up the root bone in pose mode and it gets all wonky on me. If I scale the character’s rig up in object mode, both the character and it’s mesh scales up for me.
In the file you posted, when I went into edit mode for the armature, it seemed to disappear. It didn’t disappear, it shrank in size so small that I couldn’t see it. Also, your character mesh isn’t hooked up to the armature, I can’t pose that character at all. None of the mesh objects that make up that character have armature modifiers on them.
I have to ask, why the ‘switchboard’ style rig controls?
Yeah, I’ve tried to scale everything in the way you explained as well via other videos. I was still getting scale issues upon import into Blender so I was trying this other scaling from the video in my post. I think I accidentally uploaded the incorrect Blend file, so I edited my original post to have a link to the proper Blend file which does not have anything scaled for Unreal. Everything is at Blender’s default scale for this one.
As for the strange controllers, I don’t have that much experience with rigging so the controls aren’t the best, haha. Not really sure what I was thinking with the spine controllers tbh. I’ve got a new book on rigging that I’ve been reading so I’m my controllers will be a bit more intuitive.
Alright, so I figured this out in case anyone ends up in this thread. So the bones aren’t really shrinking. It’s the fact that the custom bone meshes created for the controllers were not scaled while everything else was. So when the scale of the armature gets applied the controllers end up using a very tiny custom mesh shape. So all you have to do is also scale up your custom mesh shape for your controllers and apply that as well.
FWIW - I did look at the new file you posted in your original post last night. The armature object, when scaled up, scaled up the entire character. But when I applied the scale, the character mesh warped all over the place.
Usually when I see this sort of thing, it’s the result of the armature object and mesh object not having matching loc/rot/scale. I was going to look into how to fix it tonight, but since you’ve figured it out, no need…
I guess it’s safe to say that you should make things the correct size in blender so you don’t have to scale anything to get it to work in Unreal.
As to this:
I didn’t look really at the rig so I can’t comment on that, but what I was talking about was the switchboard - all the sliders above the character’s head. That slider setup used to be called a switchboard, and the fact that you set it up tells me you’re no dummy with rigging. Ya got game…
Anyway, I commented about it because I’ve not seen that type of setup since blender 2.5 came out maybe 12~ish years ago. Nowadays you use a custom property on a bone as the driver, instead of those switches.
That’s an arm rig, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, hands. 3 bone layers, one for FK bones, one for IK bones, and 3rd layer is the deform bones. Moving the FK_IK_Slider.L in the side panel switches the arm from IK to FK. Try it out…
40~50~ish lines of python code and you can create your own panel for the rig and put all your controls in there. If you want to see an example of that, let me know and I’ll make one in the file I posted.
I actually found the problem that makes the mesh distort after applying scale. The “Stretch to” constraints were bugging out when the scale is applied. To solve this, I disabled the constraint, added a new one and copied the settings, then removed the old bugged out constraint. Did that down the line of Stretch To constraints and the character was fixed!
As for the Switchboard controls, I figured having the properties driven by bone translation would be easier for animating. My thought was that if I have the properties controlled that way I wouldn’t have to leave Pose Mode and keep doing the same keystrokes for keying the controllers. Just sounded a bit easier/faster to me for animation.
